The 4 Cs: A recipe for precise remarketing campaigns

Last fall, I had a great time participating in “The Great PPC Account Structure Debate” at SMX East. And I loved reading how the debate shook down recently with a different panel at SMX West.

You don’t have to have attended one of those sessions, though, to know that paid search people are passionate and vocal about their preferred account structure approaches. From speaker panels to articles to white papers, you could drown in the amount of information on structuring search campaigns (and shopping campaigns).

If the well is overflowing on how to best structure “query-based” campaign types, it’s comparatively dry for another important campaign type: remarketing.

In the last couple of months, I’ve built two different remarketing campaigns where the initial couple of days of performance data was not looking good. In both cases, I was so confident in the setup of those campaigns that I knew that something was wrong with either the website or the conversion tracking.

In both cases, I discovered that I was correct: the remarketing campaigns were working, but there were cart issues in one case and conversion tracking issues in the other.

The reason I had that level of confidence is that I always structure my remarketing campaigns with the same approach: the 4 Cs.

About the 4 Cs

The 4 Cs stand for content, cookie duration, creative and context. They each provide an indication of the “value” of a return visit from a prospect. Therefore, each C or combination of Cs lives in its own ad group, with a bid that addresses the hierarchical value of that visit.

Before we get any further into the structure stuff, let’s dig into the Cs and why each matters.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]